Melting point and boiling point of ... water? Those temperatures are only "standard" at 101 kPascal (one "standard" atmosphere of dry nitrogen/oxygen). At very high or very low pressures, where 99.99% of the water in the solar system can be found, the temperatures are different. ...

Planck units. The Planck temperature is 1.4168e32K, also known as an "absolute hotness" of 1.0. That way, if anyone asks you the temperature, you can say "close to zero" and be right every time - even if you are at the core of an exploding supernova. Added note: It is about 2 mic...

... Minnesotans are tough. Or dumb. Both, really. How did anyone get tricked into living here in the first place? Anecdotally, by telling new immigrants that it lies at the same latitudes as places like Venice and Paris... Two of my great-grandparents were "probably" imported from Finland...

The Moon should be on this chart; equatorial surface temperatures range from 127C to -173C over the one month "day". On the chart, way beyond the lower right, somewhere near the middle button of your right-hand-side mouse. Fortunately for visitors, it is a very dry heat, with no snowstorms...

Longest delayed email reply? That's gotta be "What Hath God Wrought", the first long distance telegraph message from Washington DC to Baltimore in 1844. They have yet to receive a satisfactory reply. The reply I would send would be so controversial that this thread would run longer than &q...

I used to filings-season my cast iron pans at the poles, but the magnetic field is too strong there; the residual magnetism in the pan ruined my best dishes. Now ESA launches them out of the Guiana Space Center for me. The field at 5 degrees north is still substantial, but a high parabolic trajector...

Pssshht, pliers are so pro-ish noob. The real noobs strip wires with a pair of scissors or their teeth. Blimey, I'd forgotten about teeth. That was my preferred method for years. Did you stop when you were down to two teeth, or could you strip wire with the jagged remaining single tooth? edit: Seco...

Self-driving cars? That's nothing. Microsoft just invented the self-flattening pedestrian. Shaped-charge exploding batteries in the Windows phone, ignited when a Google car passes closely. The phone appears undamaged. The results look just like vehicular homicide. See you in court, Page and Brin!

Is it just me or does it seem that Google engineers just don't care about sane audio controls? The controls work great for Google's paying customers, the companies that pay to bombard you with advertisements. You (and the hapless people around you) are the product that Google delivers to advertiser...

I watched it with 30 friends in Idaho Falls. Have you ever heard the rumble of a whole city cheering? Punctuated with police sirens; the cops were cheering, too. The familiar Sun is replaced with a strange new object in the sky: a vast corona. Venus is brighter than you have EVER seen it, seemingly ...

Predicting supernovas How predictable is a supernova? I know that we can't currently predict them from the Earth, but if we were to send probes to a distant star, could those probes tell us when it was going to go supernova? The neutrino flux from a supernova goes off the charts in the hours before...

There is no abrupt edge of a shadow as depicted. The eclipse begins an hour before, with the blockage of the Sun increasing towards totality, then decreasing for an hour after. In a vastly broader swath to the north or south of the path of totality, where the Moon "misses" the Sun a bit, ...

Er ... uh ... There is no abrupt edge of a shadow as depicted. The eclipse begins an hour before, with the blockage of the Sun increasing towards totality, then decreasing for an hour after. In a vastly broader swath to the north or south of the path of totality, where the Moon "misses" th...

Regarding why plants and chlorophyll are green (ultimate, not proximate cause): Plants use the "green" pigment chlorophyll to process light because the first eukaryotic cells with chloroplasts evolved in the ocean, at depths where green light does not penetrate. Broader spectrum pigments m...

Greenland is stretched funny, probably because they get so little sun that its position in the sky (or below the southern horizon) has no bearing (ahem) on their schedules, while economic dealings with Europe do. Reforming this mess provides a great opportunity for regional defense. Greenlanders can...

A 20 ounce "classic Coke" is 240 food calories, and a food calorie is 4184J, which is also the energy in a gram of TNT. So, three years of one soda per day is the energy equivalent of 263 kilograms of TNT. A soda per day for 170 thousand years is the energy equivalent of the 15KT Hiroshima...

When I first looked at this forum page, there was no translation, so I found this webpage for translating Dvorak: http://wbic16.xedoloh.com/dvorak.html, and got the "ok google send a text" after translation. However, this is not properly secure. In the grand tradition of triple rot 13 , it...

Cat bites are very dangerous vectors of infection, especially for cartoonists. If the cat that bit Randall had previously bitten Jeff Keane, Randall would be drawing Family Circus cartoons now, and we would all be screaming and clawing our eyes out. Fortunately, he received prompt professional care.

I interpreted it (knowing that I wouldn't be quite right) as The Great Lord Randall, from context. But it's probably an ETLA that has been used in/inspired by the full text in Time or the 'secret' subforus, that I've not read. You're doing this on purpose, aren't you? Possibly, but that one's prett...

Ah, right. Still, I don't think steam would bubble out of the surface of the ocean, for the same reason it already doesn't above thermal vents. (The pressure is too high for it to be gaseous, plus the water around it would carry away heat pretty effectively.) gmalivuk would be correct for a small h...

Oh, come now. You call that a What-If? The question was " ... could we dig a hole to the ocean ... ". Not a ditch, canal ... I guess TGLR was so distracted by temperature records that he neglected to answer the actual question. About a hole. Even a tunnel barely qualifies as a hole, and ce...

Randall wants more efficient tools to manage cron output, and hopes to get useful suggestions from this forum. So do I. Sysadmin gurus, start explaining! Alt explanation 1: Since the "explainxkcd.com" page for this comic is also difficult to understand, Randall is hoping this comic will mo...

Physicists are not immune, especially if they offset 3 sigma results with the logarithm of the megaeuros spent acquiring them, or of the hundreds of papers written about them. FYI, after six more months of intense data gathering, delaying data taking for other scheduled projects at LHC, the 750 GeV ...

I've seen many meteors fall (I go camping during meteorite showers), but I've never found a meteorite. About a decade ago, I saw an extremely bright meteor east of Portland, Oregon, early in the morning on the way to the airport. Someone else at the airport had seen the same meteor a few miles up th...

Absent-minded scientist Pierre Curie was killed by a horse-drawn carriage. Horseback riding cripples and kills more young people than heroin. Pro-tips: avoid science, and inject heroin before mounting a horse.

And even if you've never witnessed it yourself, there was this guy named Disney who used to make these nature films....) Disney made fiction films, sometimes killing animals as props. . He helped exile American rocket scientists (Frank Molina and Qian Xuesen) while promoting former Nazis. Now his l...

Two years later - will anyone read this? The most luminous emissions life makes are forest fires or large grassland fires, viewed on the night side of the Earth. The spectrum of the combustion products will be unique. With a large enough telescope to resolve a planet from the Sun's disk, anomalous b...

To make a measly 3.84E26 W like our Sun, the hole would weigh 968 kilograms. The Schwarzschild radius of a 968 kg black hole is 10 -24 meters, which is millions of times smaller than a proton. In Niagara Straw , we saw what happens when you try to squeeze 3000 tonnes of water through a 3.8 x 10 -5 ...

Suggested AltWhatIf: Randall mentions an enormous firefly immediately collapsing into a black hole, but how about making a black hole as luminous as the Sun? How many fireflies would that take? Hawking radiation power is inversely proportional to the square of the mass: 3.562e32 W-kg 2 . To make a ...

We should put pictures of body parts on US currency. That will encourage young people to go to medical school, and accumulate huge debt in order to work long hours for surprisingly low wages taking care of aging baby boomers like myself. We can replace the picture of Andrew Jackson with a hemorrhoid...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4xlYpKrCnU Fulton Surface-to-Air Recovery System FTW! Way cool - an airplane snagging a line lofted by a balloon! So why not a line lofted by a kettle of vultures? A column of Rüppell's vultures climb a thermal carrying a 10 km carbon nanotube filament, very light a...

"OKAY, COOL. -- IM GONNA GO LOOK FOR A BOOK OR SOMETHING. ..." I've got a basement full of books. Mostly technical, lots of physics/chemistry/engineering handbooks. Some popsci, like an old Ray Kurzweil book predicting the singularity in 1995. A mathematics book about infinity, which expla...

Some species may undergo Darwinian selection for scientific novelty and journal paper popularity. Species whose behavior results in highly cited papers lead to increased funding and more lab space devoted to the progeny of those lab organisms. We may think we are studying the behavior of lab animals...